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How Could Vietnam Happen? An Autopsy

From the beginning of John Kennedy's Administration into this fifth year of Lyndon Johnson's presidency, substantially the same small group of men have presided over the destiny of the United States. In that time they have carried the country from a limited involvement in Vietnam into a war that is brutal, probably unwinnable, and, to an increasing body of opinion, calamitous and immoral. How could it happen? Many in government or close to it will read the following article with the shock of recognition. Those less familiar with the processes of power can read it with assurance that the author had a firsthand opportunity to watch the slide down the slippery slope during five years (1961-1966) of service in the White House and Department of State. Mr. Thomson is an East Asia specialist and an assistant professor of history at Harvard.

As a case study in the making of foreign policy, the Vietnam War
will fascinate historians and social scientists for many decades to come. One
question that will certainly be asked: How did men of superior ability, sound
training, and high ideals—American policy-makers of the 1960s—create such costly and divisive policy?

As one who watched the decision-making process in Washington from 1961 to 1966 under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, I can suggest a preliminary answer. I can do so by briefly listing some of the factors that seemed to me to shape our Vietnam policy during my years as an East Asia specialist at the State Department and the White House. I shall deal largely with Washington as I saw or sensed it, and not with Saigon, where I have spent but a scant three days, in the entourage of the Vice President, or with other decision centers, the capitals of interested parties. Nor will I deal with other important parts of the record: Vietnam's history prior to 1961, for instance, or the overall course of America's relations with Vietnam.

Yet a first and central ingredient in these years of Vietnam decisions does
involve history. The ingredient was the legacy of the 1950s —by which I mean the so-called "loss of China," the Korean War, and the Far East policy of Secretary of State Dulles.

This legacy had an institutional by-product
for the Kennedy Administration: in 1961 the U.S. government's East Asian
establishment was undoubtedly the most rigid and doctrinaire of Washington's
regional divisions in foreign affairs. This was especially true at the
Department of State, where the incoming Administration found the Bureau of Far
Eastern Affairs the hardest nut to crack. It was a bureau that had been purged
of its best China expertise, and of farsighted, dispassionate men, as a result
of McCarthyism. Its members were generally committed to one policy line: the
close containment and isolation of mainland China, the harassment of
"neutralist" nations which sought to avoid alignment with either Washington or
Peking, and the maintenance of a network of alliances with anti-Communist
client states on China's periphery.

Another aspect of the legacy was the special vulnerability and sensitivity of
the new Democratic Administration on Far East policy issues. The memory of the
McCarthy era was still very sharp, and Kennedy's margin of victory was too
thin. The 1960 Offshore Islands TV debate between Kennedy and Nixon had shown
the President-elect
the perils of "fresh thinking." The Administration was inherently leery of
moving too fast on Asia. As a result,the Far East Bureau (now the
Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs) was the last one to be
overhauled. Not until Averell Harriman was brought in as Assistant Secretary in
December, 1961, were signficant personnel changes attempted, and it took
Harriman several months to make a deep imprint on the bureau because of his
necessary preoccupation with the Laos settlement. Once he did so, there
was virtually no effort to bring back the purged or exiled East Asia
experts.

There were other important by-products
of this "legacy of the fifties":

The new Administration inherited and somewhat shared a general perception of
China-on-the-march
—a sense of China's vastness, its numbers, its belligerence; a revived
sense, perhaps, of the Golden Horde. This was a perception fed by Chinese
intervention in the Korean War (an intervention actually based on appallingly
bad communications and mutual miscalculation on the part of Washington and
Peking; but the careful unraveling of that tragedy, which scholars have
accomplished, had not yet become part of the conventional wisdom).

The new Administration inherited and briefly accepted a monolithic
conception of the Communist bloc. Despite much earlier predictions and
reports by outside analysts, policy-makers
did not begin to accept the reality and possible finality of the Sino-Soviet
split until the first weeks of 1962. The inevitably corrosive impact of
competing nationalisms on Communism was largely ignored.

The new Administration inherited and to some extent shared the "domino
theory" about Asia. This theory resulted from profound ignorance of Asian
history and hence ignorance of the radical differences among Asian nations and
societies. It resulted from a blindness to the power and resilience of Asian
nationalisms. (It may also have resulted from a subconscious sense that, since
"all Asians look alike," all Asian nations will act alike.) As a theory, the
domino fallacy was not merely inaccurate but also insulting to Asian nations;
yet it has continued to this day to beguile men who should know better.

Finally, the legacy of the fifties was apparently compounded by an uneasy sense
of a worldwide Communist challenge to the new Administration after the Bay of
Pigs fiasco. A first manifestation was the President's traumatic Vienna meeting
with Khrushchev in June, 1961; then came the Berlin crisis of the summer. All
this created an atmosphere in which President Kennedy undoubtedly felt under
special pressure to show his nation's mettle in Vietnam—if the Vietnamese,
unlike the people of Laos, were willing to fight.

In general, the legacy of the fifties shaped such early moves of the new
Administration as the decisions to maintain a high-visibility
SEATO (by sending the Secretary of State himself instead of some underling to
its first meeting in 1961), to back away from diplomatic recognition of
Mongolia in the summer of 1961, and most important, to expand U.S. military
assistance to South Vietnam that winter on the basis of the much more tentative
Eisenhower commitment. It should be added that the increased commitment to
Vietnam was also fueled by a new breed of military strategists and academic
social scientists (some of whom had entered the new Administration) who had
developed theories of counterguerrilla warfare and were eager to see them put
to the test. To some, "counterinsurgency" seemed a new panacea for coping with
the world's instability.

SO MUCH for the legacy and the history. Any new Administration inherits both
complicated problems and simplistic views of the world. But surely among the
policy-makers
of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations there were men who would warn of the
dangers of an open-ended commitment to the Vietnam quagmire?

This raises a central question, at the heart of the policy process: Where were
the experts, the doubters, and the dissenters? Were they there at all, and if
so, what happened to them?

The answer is complex but instructive.

In the first place, the American government was sorely lacking in real
Vietnam or Indochina expertise. Originally treated as an adjunct of Embassy
Paris, our Saigon embassy and the Vietnam Desk at State were largely staffed
from 1954 onward by French-speaking
Foreign Service personnel of narrowly European experience. Such diplomats were
even more closely restricted than the normal embassy officer—by cast of mind
as well as language—to contacts with Vietnam's French-speaking
urban elites. For instance, Foreign Service linguists in Portugal are able to
speak with the peasantry if they get out of Lisbon and choose to do so; not so
the French speakers of Embassy Saigon.

In addition, the shadow of the "loss of China" distorted Vietnam
reporting. Career officers in the Department, and especially those in the
field, had not forgotten the fate of their World War II colleagues who wrote in
frankness from China and were later pilloried by Senate committees for critical
comments on the Chinese Nationalists. Candid reporting on the strengths of the
Viet Cong and the weaknesses of the Diem government was inhibited by the
memory. It was also inhibited by some higher officials, notably Ambassador
Nolting in Saigon, who refused to sign off on such cables.

In due course, to be sure, some Vietnam talent was discovered or developed. But
a recurrent and increasingly important factor in the decisionmaking process was
the banishment of real expertise. Here the underlying cause was the
"closed politics" of policy-making
as issues become hot: the more sensitive the issue, and the higher it rises in
the bureaucracy, the more completely the experts are excluded while the
harassed senior generalists take over (that is, the Secretaries,
Undersecretaries, and Presidential Assistants). The frantic skimming of
briefing papers in the back seats of limousines is no substitute for the
presence of specialists; furthermore, in times of crisis such papers are deemed
"too sensitive" even for review by the specialists. Another underlying cause of
this banishment, as Vietnam became more critical, was the replacement of the
experts, who were generally and increasingly pessimistic, by men described as
"can-do
guys," loyal and energetic fixers unsoured by expertise. In early 1965, when I
confided my growing policy doubts to an older colleague on the NSC staff, he
assured me that the smartest thing both of us could do was to "steer clear of
the whole Vietnam mess"; the gentleman in question had the misfortune to be a
"can-do
guy," however, and is now highly placed in Vietnam, under orders to solve the
mess.

Despite the banishment of the experts, internal doubters and dissenters did
indeed appear and persist. Yet as I watched the process, such men were
effectively neutralized by a subtle dynamic: the domestication of
dissenters. Such "domestication" arose out of a twofold clubbish need: on
the one hand, the dissenter's desire to stay aboard; and on the other hand, the
nondissenter's conscience. Simply stated, dissent, when recognized, was made to
feel at home. On the lowest possible scale of importance, I must confess my own
considerable sense of dignity and acceptance (both vital) when my senior White
House employer would refer to me as his "favorite dove." Far more significant
was the case of the former Undersecretary of State, George Ball. Once Mr. Ball
began to express doubts, he was warmly institutionalized: he was encouraged to
become the inhouse devil's advocate on Vietnam. The upshot was inevitable: the
process of escalation allowed for periodic requests to Mr. Ball to speak his
piece; Ball felt good, I assume (he had fought for righteousness); the others
felt good (they had given a full hearing to the dovish option); and there was
minimal unpleasantness. The club remained intact; and it is of course possible
that matters would have gotten worse faster if Mr. Ball had kept silent, or
left before his final departure in the fall of 1966. There was also,
of course, the case of the last institutionalized doubter, Bill Moyers. The
President is said to have greeted his arrival at meetings with an affectionate,
"Well, here comes Mr. Stop-the-Bombing...."
Here again the dynamics of domesticated dissent sustained the relationship
for a while.

A related point—and crucial, I suppose, to government at all times—was
the "effectiveness" trap, the trap that keeps men from speaking out, as
clearly or often as they might, within the government. And it is the trap that
keeps men from resigning in protest and airing their dissent outside the
government. The most important asset that a man brings to bureaucratic life is
his "effectiveness," a mysterious combination of training, style, and
connections. The most ominous complaint that can be whispered of a bureaucrat
is: "I'm afraid Charlie's beginning to lose his effectiveness." To preserve
your effectiveness, you must decide where and when to fight the mainstream of
policy; the opportunities range from pillow talk with your wife, to private
drinks with your friends, to meetings with the Secretary of State or the
President. The inclination to remain silent or to acquiesce in the presence of
the great men—to live to fight another day, to give on this issue so that
you can be "effective" on later issues—is overwhelming. Nor is it the
tendency of youth alone; some of our most senior officials, men of wealth and
fame, whose place in history is secure, have remained silent lest their
connection with power be terminated. As for the disinclination to resign in
protest: while not necessarily a Washington or even American specialty, it
seems more true of a government in which ministers have no parliamentary
backbench to which to retreat. In the absence of such a refuge, it is easy to
rationalize the decision to stay aboard. By doing so, one may be able to
prevent a few bad things from happening and perhaps even make a few good things
happen. To exit is to lose even those marginal chances for "effectiveness."

Another factor must be noted: as the Vietnam controversy escalated at home,
there developed a preoccupation with Vietnam public relations as opposed to
Vietnam policy-making.
And here, ironically, internal doubters and dissenters were heavily
employed. For such men, by virtue of their own doubts, were often deemed best
able to "massage" the doubting intelligentsia. My senior East Asia colleague at
the White House, a brilliant and humane doubter who had dealt with Indochina
since 1954, spent three quarters of his working days on Vietnam public
relations: drafting presidential responses to letters from important critics,
writing conciliatory language for presidential speeches, and meeting quite
interminably with delegations of outraged Quakers, clergymen, academics, and
housewives. His regular callers were the late A. J. Muste and Norman Thomas;
mine were members of the Women's Strike for Peace. Our orders from above: keep
them off the backs of busy policy-makers
(who usually happened to be nondoubters). Incidentally, my most discouraging
assignment in the realm of public relations was the preparation of a White
House pamphlet entitled Why Vietnam, in September, 1965; in a gesture
toward my conscience, I fought—and lost—a battle to have the title
followed by a question mark.

THROUGH a variety of procedures, both institutional and personal, doubt,
dissent, and expertise were effectively neutralized in the making of policy.
But what can be said of the men "in charge"? It is patently absurd to suggest
that they produced such tragedy by intention and calculation. But it is neither
absurd nor difficult to discern certain forces at work that caused decent and
honorable men to do great harm.

Here I would stress the paramount role of executive fatigue. No factor
seems to me more crucial and underrated in the making of foreign policy. The
physical and emotional toll of executive responsibility in State, the Pentagon,
the White House, and other executive agencies is enormous; that toll is of
course compounded by extended service. Many of today's Vietnam policy-makers
have been on the job for from four to seven years. Complaints may be few, and
physical health may remain unimpaired, though emotional health is far harder to
gauge. But what is most seriously eroded in the deadening process of fatigue is
freshness of thought, imagination, a sense of possibility, a sense of
priorities and perspective— those rare assets of a new Administration in its
first year or two of office. The tired policy-maker
becomes a prisoner of his own narrowed view of the world and his own
clichéd rhetoric. He becomes irritable and defensive—short on sleep,
short on family ties, short on patience. Such men make bad policy and then
compound it. They have neither the time nor the temperament for new ideas or
preventive diplomacy.

Below the level of the fatigued executives in the making of Vietnam policy was
a widespread phenomenon: the curator mentality in the Department of
State. By this I mean the collective inertia produced by the bureaucrat's view
of his job. At State, the average "desk officer" inherits from his predecessor
our policy toward Country X; he regards it as his function to keep that policy
intact —under glass, untampered with, and dusted—so that he may pass it
on in two to four years to his successor. And such curatorial service generally
merits promotion within the system. (Maintain the status quo, and you will stay
out of trouble.) In some circumstances, the inertia bred by such an outlook can
act as a brake against rash innovation. But on many issues, this inertia
sustains the momentum of bad policy and unwise commitments—momentum that
might otherwise have been resisted within the ranks. Clearly, Vietnam is such
an issue.

To fatigue and inertia must be added the factor of internal confusion. Even
among the "architects" of our Vietnam commitment, there has been persistent
confusion as to what type of war we were fighting and, as a direct
consequence, confusion as to how to end that war. (The "credibility gap"
is, in part, a reflection of such internal confusion.) Was it, for instance, a
civil war, in which case counterinsurgency might suffice? Or was it a war of
international aggression? (This might invoke SEATO or UN commitment. ) Who was
the aggressor—and the "real enemy"? The Viet Cong? Hanoi? Peking? Moscow?
International Communism? Or maybe "Asian Communism"? Differing enemies dictated
differing strategies and tactics. And confused throughout, in like fashion, was
the question of American objectives; your objectives depended on whom you were
fighting and why. I shall not forget my assignment from an Assistant Secretary
of State in March, 1964: to draft a speech for Secretary McNamara which would,
inter alia, once and for all dispose of the canard that the Vietnam
conflict was a civil war. "But in some ways, of course," I mused, "it is
a civil war." "Don't play word games with me!" snapped the Assistant
Secretary.

Similar confusion beset the concept of "negotiations"—anathema to much of
official Washington from 1961 to 1965. Not until April, 1965, did
"unconditional discussions" become respectable, via a presidential speech; even
then the Secretary of State stressed privately to newsmen that nothing had
changed, since "discussions" were by no means the same as "negotiations."
Months later that issue was resolved. But it took even longer to obtain a
fragile internal agreement that negotiations might include the Viet Cong as
something other than an appendage to Hanoi's delegation. Given such confusion
as to the whos and whys of our Vietnam commitment, it is not surprising, as
Theodore Draper has written, that policy-makers
find it so difficult to agree on how to end the war.

Of course, one force—a constant in the vortex of commitment—was that
of wishful thinking. I partook of it myself at many times. I did
so especially during Washington's struggle with Diem in the autumn of 1963 when
some of us at State believed that for once, in dealing with a difficult client
state, the U.S. government could use the leverage of our economic and military
assistance to make good things happen, instead of being led around by the nose
by men like Chiang Kai-shek
and Syngman Rhee (and, in that particular instance, by Diem). If we could prove
that point, I thought, and move into a new day, with or without Diem, then
Vietnam was well worth the effort. Later came the wishful thinking of the air-
strike
planners in the late autumn of 1964; there were those who actually thought that
after six weeks of air strikes, the North Vietnamese would come crawling to us
to ask for peace talks. And what, someone asked in one of the meetings of the
time, if they don't? The answer was that we would bomb for another four weeks,
and that would do the trick. And a few weeks later came one instance of wishful
thinking that was symptomatic of good men misled: in January, 1965, I
encountered one of the very highest figures in the Administration at a dinner,
drew him aside, and told him of my worries about the air-strike
option. He told me that I really shouldn't worry; it was his conviction that
before any such plans could be put into effect, a neutralist government would
come to power in Saigon that would politely invite us out. And finally, there
was the recurrent wishful thinking that sustained many of us through the trying
months of 1965-1966
after the air strikes had begun: that surely, somehow, one way or another, we
would "be in a conference in six months," and the escalatory spiral would be
suspended. The basis of our hope: "It simply can't go on."

As a further influence on policy-makers
I would cite the factor of bureaucratic detachment. By this I mean what
at best might be termed the professional callousness of the surgeon (and
indeed, medical lingo—the "surgical strike" for instance—seemed to crop up
in the euphemisms of the times). In Washington the semantics of the military
muted the reality of war for the civilian policy-makers.
In quiet, air-conditioned,
thick-carpeted rooms, such terms as "systematic pressure," "armed
reconnaissance," "targets of opportunity," and even "body count" seemed to
breed a sort of games-theory
detachment. Most memorable to me was a moment in the late 1964 target planning
when the question under discussion was how heavy our bombing should be, and how
extensive our strafing, at some midpoint in the projected pattern of systematic
pressure. An Assistant Secretary of State resolved the point in the following
words: "It seems to me that our orchestration should be mainly violins, but
with periodic touches of brass." Perhaps the biggest shock of my return to
Cambridge, Massachusetts, was the realization that the young men, the flesh and
blood I taught and saw on these university streets, were potentially some of
the numbers on the charts of those faraway planners. In a curious sense,
Cambridge is closer to this war than Washington.

There is an unprovable factor that relates to bureaucratic detachment: the
ingredient of cryptoracism. I do not mean to imply any conscious
contempt for Asian loss of life on the part of Washington officials. But I do
mean to imply that bureaucratic detachment may well be compounded by a
traditional Western sense that there are so many Asians, after all; that Asians
have a fatalism about life and a disregard for its loss; that they are cruel
and barbaric to their own people; and that they are very different from us (and
all lookalike?). And I do mean to imply that the upshot of such
subliminal views is a subliminal question whether Asians, and particularly
Asian peasants, and most particularly Asian Communists, are really people—like
you and me. To put the matter another way: would we have pursued quite such
policies—and quite such military tactics—if the Vietnamese were white?

It is impossible to write of Vietnam decision-making without writing about
language. Throughout the conflict, words have been of paramount importance. I
refer here to the impact of rhetorical escalation and to the problem
of oversell. In an important sense, Vietnam has become of crucial
significance to us because we have said that it is of crucial
significance. (The issue obviously relates to the public relations
preoccupation described earlier. )

The key here is domestic politics: the need to sell the American people, press,
and Congress on support for an unpopular and costly war in which the objectives
themselves have been in flux. To sell means to persuade, and to persuade means
rhetoric. As the difficulties and costs have mounted, so has the definition of
the stakes. This is not to say that rhetorical escalation is an orderly
process; executive prose is the product of many writers, and some
concepts—North Vietnamese infiltration, America's "national honor," Red
China as the chief enemy—have entered the rhetoric only gradually and
even sporadically. But there is an upward spiral nonetheless. And once you have
said that the American Experiment itself stands or falls on the Vietnam
outcome, you have thereby created a national stake far beyond any
earlier stakes.

Crucial throughout the process of Vietnam decision-making
was a conviction among many policy-makers:
that Vietnam posed a fundamental test of America's national will. Time
and again I was told by men reared in the tradition of Henry L. Stimson that
all we needed was the will, and we would then prevail. Implicit in such a view,
it seemed to me, was a curious assumption that Asians lacked will, or at least
that in a contest between Asian and Anglo-Saxon
wills, the non-Asians must prevail. A corollary to the persistent belief in will
was a fascination with power and an awe in the face of the power
America possessed as no nation or civilization ever before. Those who doubted
our role in Vietnam were said to shrink from the burdens of power, the
obligations of power, the uses of power, the responsibility of power. By
implication, such men were soft-headedand effete.

Finally, no discussion of the factors and forces at work on Vietnam policy-
makers
can ignore the central fact of human ego investment. Men who have
participated in a decision develop a stake in that decision. As they
participate in further, related decisions, their stake increases. It might have
been possible to dissuade a man of strong self-confidence
at an early stage of the ladder of decision; but it is infinitely harder at
later stages since a change of mind there usually involves implicit or explicit
repudiation of a chain of previous decisions.

To put it bluntly: at the heart of the Vietnam calamity is a group of able,
dedicated men who have been regularly and repeatedly wrong—and whose standing
with their contemporaries, and more important, with history, depends, as they
see it, on being proven right. These are not men who can be asked to extricate
themselves from error.

THE various ingredients I have cited in the making of Vietnam policy have
created a variety of results, most of them fairly obvious. Here are some that
seem to me most central:

Throughout the conflict, there has been persistent and repeated
miscalculation by virtually all the actors, in high echelons and low,
whether dove, hawk, or something else. To cite one simple example among many:
in late 1964 and early 1965, some peace-seeking
planners at State who strongly opposed the projected bombing of the North urged
that, instead, American ground forces be sent to South Vietnam; this would,
they said, increase our bargaining leverage against the North—our "chips" —and would give us something to negotiate about (the withdrawal of our forces)
at an early peace conference. Simultaneously, the air-strike
option was urged by many in the military who were dead set against American
participation in "another land war in Asia"; they were joined by other civilian
peace-seekers
who wanted to bomb Hanoi into early negotiations. By late 1965, we had ended up
with the worst of all worlds: ineffective and costly air strikes against the
North, spiraling ground forces in the South, and no negotiations in sight.

Throughout the conflict as well, there has been a steady give-in
to pressures for a military solution and only minimal and sporadic efforts
at a diplomatic and political solution. In part this resulted from the
confusion (earlier cited) among the civilians— confusion regarding objectives
and strategy. And in part this resulted from the self-enlarging
nature of military investment. Once air strikes and particularly ground forces
were introduced, our investment itself had transformed the original stakes.
More air power was needed to protect the ground forces; and then more ground
forces to protect the ground forces. And needless to say, the military mind
develops its own momentum in the absence of clear guidelines from the
civilians. Once asked to save South Vietnam, rather than to "advise" it, the
American military could not but press for escalation. In addition, sad to
report, assorted military constituencies, once involved in Vietnam, have had a
series of cases to prove: for instance, the utility not only of air power (the
Air Force) but of supercarrier-based
air power (the Navy). Also, Vietnam policy has suffered from one ironic
byproduct of Secretary McNamara's establishment of civilian control at the
Pentagon: in the face of such control, interservice rivalry has given way to a
united front among the military—reflected in the new but recurrent phenomenon
of JCS unanimity. In conjunction with traditional congressional allies (mostly
Southern senators and representatives) such a united front would pose a
formidable problem for any President.

Throughout the conflict, there have been missed opportunities, large and
small, to disengage ourselves from Vietnam on increasingly unpleasant but still
acceptable terms. Of the many moments from 1961 onward, I shall cite only
one, the last and most important opportunity that was lost: in the summer of
1964 the President instructed his chief advisers to prepare for him as wide a
range of Vietnam options as possible for postelection consideration and
decision. He explicitly asked that all options be laid out. What happened next
was, in effect, Lyndon Johnson's slow-motion
Bay of Pigs. For the advisers so effectively converged on one single option —
juxtaposed against two other, phony options (in effect, blowing up the world,
or scuttle-and-run)
— that the President was confronted with unanimity for bombing the North from
all his trusted counselors. Had he been more confident in foreign affairs, had
he been deeply informed on Vietnam and Southeast Asia, and had he raised some
hard questions that unanimity had submerged, this President could have used the
largest electoral mandate in history to de-escalate
in Vietnam, in the clear expectation that at the worst a neutralist government
would come to power in Saigon and politely invite us out. Today, many lives and
dollars later, such an alternative has become an elusive and infinitely more
expensive possibility.

In the course of these years, another result of Vietnam decision-making
has been the abuse and distortion of history. Vietnamese, Southeast
Asian, and Far Eastern history has been rewritten by our policy-makers,
and their spokesmen, to conform with the alleged necessity of our presence in
Vietnam. Highly dubious analogies from our experience elsewhere—the "Munich"
sellout and "containment" from Europe, the Malayan insurgency and the Korean
War from Asia—have been imported in order to justify our actions. And more
recent events have been fitted to the Procrustean bed of Vietnam. Most notably,
the change of power in Indonesia in 1965-1966
has been ascribed to our Vietnam presence; and virtually all progress in the
Pactfic region—the rise of regionalism, new forms of cooperation, and mounting
growth rates—has been similarly explained. The Indonesian allegation is
undoubtedly false (I tried to prove it, during six months of careful
investigation at the White House, and had to confess failure); the regional
allegation is patently unprovable in either direction (except, of course, for
the clear fact that the economies of both Japan and Korea have profited
enormously from our Vietnam-related
procurement in these countries; but that is a costly and highly dubious form of
foreign aid).

There is a final result of Vietnam policy I would cite that holds potential
danger for the future of American foreign policy: the rise of a new
breed of American ideologues who see Vietnam as the ultimate test of their
doctrine. I have in mind those men in Washington who have given a new life
to the missionary impulse in American foreign relations: who believe that this
nation, in this era, has received a threefold endowment that can transform the
world. As they see it, that endowment is composed of, first, our unsurpassed
military might; second, our clear technological supremacy; and third, our
allegedly invincible benevolence (our "altruism," our affluence, our lack of
territorial aspirations). Together, it is argued, this threefold endowment
provides us with the opportunity and the obligation to ease the nations of the
earth toward modernization and stability: toward a fullfledged Pax Americana
Technocratica. In reaching toward this goal, Vietnam is viewed as the last
and crucial test. Once we have succeeded there, the road ahead is clear. In a
sense, these men are our counterpart to the visionaries of Communism's radical
left: they are technocracy's own Maoists. They do not govern Washington today.
But their doctrine rides high.

Long before I went into government, I was told a story about Henry L. Stimson
that seemed to me pertinent during the years that I watched the Vietnam tragedy
unfold—and participated in that tragedy. It seems to me more pertinent than ever as we move toward the election of 1968.

In his waning years Stimson was asked by an anxious questioner, "Mr. Secretary,
how on earthcan we ever bring peace to the world?" Stimson is said to
have answered: "You begin by bringing to Washington a small handful of able men
who believe that the achievement of peace is possible.

"You work them to the bone until they no longer believe that it is possible.

"And then you throw them out—and bring in a new bunch who believe
that it is possible."

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His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

Why did Trump’s choice for national-security advisor perform so well in the war on terror, only to find himself forced out of the Defense Intelligence Agency?

How does a man like retired Lieutenant General Mike Flynn—who spent his life sifting through information and parsing reports, separating rumor and innuendo from actionable intelligence—come to promote conspiracy theories on social media?

Perhaps it’s less Flynn who’s changed than that the circumstances in which he finds himself—thriving in some roles, and flailing in others.

In diagnostic testing, there’s a basic distinction between sensitivity, or the ability to identify positive results, and specificity, the ability to exclude negative ones. A test with high specificity may avoid generating false positives, but at the price of missing many diagnoses. One with high sensitivity may catch those tricky diagnoses, but also generate false positives along the way. Some people seem to sift through information with high sensitivity, but low specificity—spotting connections that others can’t, and perhaps some that aren’t even there.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Democrats who have struggled for years to sell the public on the Affordable Care Act are now confronting a far more urgent task: mobilizing a political coalition to save it.

Even as the party reels from last month’s election defeat, members of Congress, operatives, and liberal allies have turned to plotting a campaign against repealing the law that, they hope, will rival the Tea Party uprising of 2009 that nearly scuttled its passage in the first place. A group of progressive advocacy groups will announce on Friday a coordinated effort to protect the beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act and stop Republicans from repealing the law without first identifying a plan to replace it.

They don’t have much time to fight back. Republicans on Capitol Hill plan to set repeal of Obamacare in motion as soon as the new Congress opens in January, and both the House and Senate could vote to wind down the law immediately after President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office on the 20th.

Trinidad has the highest rate of Islamic State recruitment in the Western hemisphere. How did this happen?

This summer, the so-called Islamic State published issue 15 of its online magazine Dabiq. In what has become a standard feature, it ran an interview with an ISIS foreign fighter. “When I was around twenty years old I would come to accept the religion of truth, Islam,” said Abu Sa’d at-Trinidadi, recalling how he had turned away from the Christian faith he was born into.

At-Trinidadi, as his nom de guerre suggests, is from the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), a country more readily associated with calypso and carnival than the “caliphate.” Asked if he had a message for “the Muslims of Trinidad,” he condemned his co-religionists at home for remaining in “a place where you have no honor and are forced to live in humiliation, subjugated by the disbelievers.” More chillingly, he urged Muslims in T&T to wage jihad against their fellow citizens: “Terrify the disbelievers in their own homes and make their streets run with their blood.”

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

A new survey suggests many might prefer a kind of multipolar Washington, with three distinct orbits of power checking each other.

Does Donald Trump have a mandate?

Though last month’s election provided Trump and his fellow Republicans unified control of the White House, House of Representatives, and Senate for the first time since 2006, the latest Allstate/Atlantic Media Heartland Monitor Poll shows the country remains closely split on many of the key policy challenges facing the incoming administration—and sharply divided on whether they trust the next president to take the lead in responding to them.

In addition, on several important choices facing the new administration and Congress, the survey found that respondents who voted for Trump supported a position that was rejected by the majority of adults overall. That contrast may simultaneously encourage Trump to press forward on an agenda that energizes his coalition, while emboldening congressional Democrats to resist him.